The Summer 2021 Box of Comics

by

Scott D. Parker

If there's one great thing about ebooks and electric comics is that you can carry potentially your entire library on vacation. 

But that wasn't always the case back in the days before Kindles and iPads. No, back then, you'd have to be judicious with what you wanted to read while on vacation because you'd have to carry everything. In my adulthood, I would spend almost as much time deciding on what books and magazine to bring on a vacation as I did on my entire vacation's wardrobe. I know I'm not alone here. I mean, as much as I enjoyed the 800-page, hard cover history book was I reading, there was no way it found it's way into my backpack for reading on a plane. 

Before adulthood, however, there was another factor that determined what we might bring on a vacation: our parents. I remember my youth in the 70s when we'd go on vacation, my parents would not let me take EVERY comic I owned. Even as an only child, it was just not feasible to bring them all. A friend of mine were talking this week and he mentioned his mom told him he could only bring ten comics on their annual trips. He always prioritized the 100-page giants and the like so he could maximize his reading experience. I did something similar. 

Most of the time, those issues would have a then-current story backed with multiple reprints ranging from the 1940s to the 1960s. In an era where back issues were few and far between, these issues rocked. Well, unless is some crappy story feature Prince Valiant or some Viking nonsense. Didn’t like it then. Still don’t. 

Summer 2021

One of my summer projects is to catalog all my comics. I’m almost done. A nice side effect was seeing all these old issues. Some of them have distinct memories associated with them. Others—many others—do not. In fact, I started culling many issues. “Why the heck did I buy that one?” I asked myself more than once.

Seeing all these issues made me want to read them again. Sure, I could keep all my long boxes in the front room all summer, but I think we know how that would go over with the rest of the family. So I made my own Summer 2021 comic box. I’ll probably go back and pull a few other issues, but mainly, the titles I want to read are in this box.

Those thicks ones are those awesome black-and-white reprints where you get 500 pages of comics in a single volume, the modern equivalent to those old 100-page giants.

I’ve been reading through the Master of Kung Fu collection for a little while, but I’ve sped up knowing the movie is on its way. The others are just hankering I’ve been having: 70s-era Marvel books I never read back in the day.

Marvel also published eight magazine-sized Doc Savage issues, all black-and-white. I have them all, but I’ve only read the first one.

This is one where I remember buying it but have zero memory of it. I like the 70s and 80s when comics artists and writers would just try anything, like apparently making a quarterback into a super hero. Sure.

I have a ton of Superman tiles, second only to Batman. But this Time and Time Again series is something that looks interesting.

Then there are titles like this. Have to read it for the historical value.

I discovered a few X-Files comics which are in the box, but that also led to re-discover this entry where the Dark Knight is abducted. 

This issue of Detective is one of the earliest I ever had. Can’t remember the story, but I will this summer. You can see the frayed edges of a well-loved book.

I’ve got a few novels lined up to read, but I think the Summer of 2021 will be comic heavy.

So, did your parents limit the number of novels and comics for your trips? Did you get to buy some on the road? And what specific comics can you remember reading during the summers?

Dead Girl Blues: Living With the Monster.

Back when I was an aspiring writer, one thing would always puzzle me, and that thing was the oft-repeated phrase “Find your own voice.”

“Understand character,” I got, as I did “Know the difference between story and plot,” but the own voice thing – especially because it was often referenced adjacent to finding your character’s voice – confused the hell out of me.

Til I discovered Lawrence Block. The first thing I read was a Bernie Rhodenbarr novel ( “the burglar in the closet,” I think) then I dipped into – and was quickly consumed by – The Matt Scudder novels. I devoured the Keller books, and then purchased his collected shorts “Enough rope,” and – in short order – everything I could lay my hands on. And as I read – and fell in love with – Block’s work, the phrase began to make sense.

Here was a body of work that had, as protagonists, a chatty sweet bookseller cum cat burglar, a brooding, depressive alcoholic ex-cop, a philatelist funding his hobby (habit) by killing people for money.

But what they have in common – what Block is a master of – is the authorial voice. The characters are varied, but the storytelling is conversational. When Block’s recounting a tale it’s like the days when your dad read you a story at bedtime, it’s (aptly for this book) the stranger in the bar who’s so entertaining you stand him several Jamesons and have the best night of your life. You’re in the story until a little aside pops up – may be irrelevant, may be entirely relevant - and you go with it because it’s hugely enjoyable.

Because his voice tells you stories you’re gripped by, tells them in such a way that even when they’re about the darkest things possible (Scudder accidentally killed a child while drunk, precipitating his exit from the NYPD, the end of his marriage and his slide down to a point where – in the earlier books – we feel he’s never far from putting the business end of his revolver in his mouth and pulling the trigger) you want to know what happens next. No matter how bad it gets.

And so we come to Dead Girl Blues, Lawrence Block’s  latest standalone novel. Block’s voice is key here, because this is a book about a man who commits an atrocity, and of what happens to him in the decades that follow.

It’s a horrible book, insofar as it (in this reader at least) inspired horror.

And it’s an absolute triumph.

We meet a man. He tells us, right up front, what he’s done, and we wait. To find out what happens next. Until we realise that we’re in the hands of a Scheherazade who knows no more than we do. This is not a Genius serial killer, or a deranged psychopath. Nor is it any of the dozen or so immediately recognisable tropes that are often used in these types of tales.

Here, instead, is an average man. Who walked into a bar one night. And did something terrible. There’s no pretence that what he did was an anomaly – we learn that the thought that triggered the act remains, that the consideration of the act itself is, in a way, a pleasurable act, and one which both keeps our protagonist away from repeating the act even as it edges him closer to an encore.

His self-awareness – the fact that this man knows what he’s done, knows he wants to do it again, and knows that only a series of quirks of fate have prevented him becoming the beast he fears he is – makes him even more horrifying than all the cartoon killers on the shelves.

Because this one feels real. He diverts on to topics as wide-ranging as favourite TV shows, or the challenges of having grown-up kids about to go off to college. He’s the man who could live next door; nice but unremarkable. He’s the husband you met later in life; the step-father you always wanted. And his normality is what makes him truly horrifying.

Block’s ability to tell us terrible stuff that rings true, to mix it with the mundane and instantly recognisable, and to retain our interest in - dammit, at times even our sympathy for - the character telling the story elevates this book into something that’s by turns chilling, warming, disturbingly erotic. It’s touching in its gentle descriptions of a marriage that becomes a love story, and the story’s ethics – Blocks empathy, which I have always felt is a hallmark of his work – makes it an odd sort of <and this is not a spoiler> redemption story.

It’s a book about the monster in all of us, and what happens when that monster gets loose. And it’s a book, I think, about learning to live with the monster and the consequences of our actions.

One of the best books he’s ever written.

Dead Girl Blues is our June 24^th and you can pre-order it here <or buy it if you’re reading this after June 24^th. In which case one has to ask: where the hell have you been? We missed you.>

***

Derek Farrell is the author of ‘Death of a Diva’ ‘Death of a Nobody,’ ‘Death of a Devil’ ‘Death of an Angel,’ and the novella "Death of a Sinner," all published by Fahrenheit Press.

The books have been described as “Like The Thin Man meets Will & Grace.” “Like M.C. Beaton on MDMA,” and – by no less an expert than Eric Idle – as “Quite Fun.”

Derek’s jobs have included: Burger dresser, Bank teller, David Bowie’s paperboy, and Investment Banker. He has lived and worked in New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Prague, Dublin, Johannesburg and London.

Farrell is married to the most English man on the planet and lives in West Sussex. They have no goats chickens children or pets, but they do have every Kylie Minogue record ever made.

Book Cover Challenge

By Claire Booth

Of all the accounts and credit cards and license plates that populate my life, there is only one string of numbers that I actually have memorized. The one on my library card. 

My very well-used library card.

I can type it in five seconds flat. And I do, very frequently. I’m always reserving books online or checking them out at the quick self-serve kiosk at my local branch. When I’m there, I see teenagers doing their homework and reading graphic novels after school; retirees working on family history through the free genealogy database access; community groups using the meeting room; and best of all, small children balancing tall stacks of picture books that they insist they can handle by themselves.

So I was delighted this week when the Sacramento County Public Library challenged me on Twitter to post a book cover a day for seven days. It was a fun task that had me looking through my books in a way I haven’t in quite a while, purely as a form of visual art.

Here are my seven covers. What do you think of my choices? And what covers would you pick?